From Reductionism to Creativity

FROM REDUCTIONISM TO CREATIVITY
by Herbert Guenther
 
From the Introduction


The history of Buddhist thought is a unique example of the interplay between creativity and reductionism, between novelty and confirmation, and it is the purpose of this book to trace the interaction between these complementary movements. Therefore this book is not just another restatement of what is considered to be Buddhist philosophy, even if references are made to the various systems that prevailed at one time or another. Actually, any intellectual system—philosophical, religious, political, or any other kind—is geared to reductionist ways of thinking and is bound to end up in the utter stagnation and rigidity of a tyrannical dogmatism. Buddhist philosophy, in this respect, is no exception. The much vaunted Madhyamaka philosophy, particularly in its Prasangika version, is the ultimate in reductionism, and its manifestation as dogmatic intolerance in Tibetan history is well known. This system has much in common with the now-defunct Western school of logical positivism and its anemic revival, “analytical” philosophy. For this reason, the Madhyamaka system has attracted the attention of academics who, because of their tacit presuppositions, unwittingly paint a one-sided picture of Buddhist thought.


Despite this reductionist quality, however, system or model building is itself a creative process, one through which we attempt to develop a generalized world view out of observations and valuations. Unfortunately, we then impose this world view on our dealings with the physical, social, and cultural-spiritual aspects of our environment, with the inevitable result that the free play of creative imagination is strangled.


The rejection of the static notion of a self (Skt. atman), which is usually claimed to mark Buddhist thought off from the rest of its Brahmanical environment, is not truly an innovative idea. Rather, it merely clarifies the distinction between that which exists “materially,” as for instance the so-called atoms that the early Buddhists accepted uncritically, and that which exists “nominally,” as for instance, ideas, notions, meanings. The truly innovative idea aspect of early Buddhist thought was its emphasis on mind—or, more properly, mentation (Skt. citta, Tib. sems)—and the conception of it as a feedback and “feedforward” mechanism reflecting the then-still-prevailing “thing-likeness” type of thinking as described by Carl Gustav Jung (Jung 1971/1976, 42.). Preference of the term “mentation” over the more commonly used term “mind” is due to the consideration that “mentation” does not have the markedly static, entitative connotation of the latter term. Although it took a long time for Buddhist thinkers to free themselves from the idea of the thingness of mentation, the notion of it as a process eventually had far-reaching consequences. In this new idea of mentation as a process, we can detect a shift from the syntactic level of information to a semantic level of information. The syntactic level is geared to the reconfirmation and strengthening of already-existing structures and patterns of life, while the semantic level pertains to the context of particular meanings.


To a certain extent, language with its linear arrangement of words locks us into the trap of thinking of the individual's growth as building up from the bottom. The complications resulting from this starting-point or “initial condition” have to be resolved by critical investigation, which is the path or the actual going; and the end of the process is a crowning superstructure or goal. In a static world view, this goal is intellectual, spiritual, and cultural death camouflaged by evocative linguistic devices. Whichever direction the escape entailed by such a static view may take, be it into the myth of an objective world minus man, or into the myth of subjective idealism—mentation minus world, it reflects man's quite irrational need for security, which is rooted in fear.


This idea of mentation as process has found its expression in the idea of “path” or “way.” Essentially, path is a dynamic notion, and its process character became ever more evident in the course of the development of Buddhist thought. The path thus became synonymous with the unfolding of an individual's potential rather than being conceived of as merely a “way out.” This latter connotation continued to dominate Buddhist thought only so long as a static world view prevailed, in which creative participation on the part of the individual was seen as minimal and where the only alternative to stagnation was escape into a “state” that remains without consequences. This ideal state was that supposed to be attained by the arhant in early Buddhism.


The emphasis on mind/mentation, not only as a dynamic factor, but as an operational system, is already present in early Buddhist thought, where it initiated a further probing into the dynamics of the system and paved the way for a new vision of reality and the human being's embeddedness in it. This does not mean that the old model was simply discarded; rather the old model was incorporated into the new one and given a new meaning. With mentation at the center of the individual's life, it was clearly seen that the granular constituents of the overall attitude a person displays toward the world and toward himself were more of the nature of distinct modes of a unitary ongoing process than discrete atomic entities. On closer inspection, this process revealed a dual character and movement. The first movement presented a continuous transformation in the direction of what is commonly referred to as “consciousness.” It is instrumental in the structuring of one's world experience as it becomes predominantly geared to representational and objectifying thinking. In this manner objects exist for a subject which then “grasps,” “manipulates,” and “controls” them. In this respect, this renewed emphasis on mentation is not very different from other psychologies of subjective dominance. What is new in this reassessment of the operation of mentation is the recognition that the subject-object structure of thought is an emergent structure that is far from being normative for all experience.


The other movement within mentation presents, as it were, a complete reversal of this trend toward dichotomic thought patterns. Not only is the subject-object structure of thought suspended in this reversal, but the experiencer himself is “changed.” He no longer apprehends himself as an isolatable entity called “subject” among other entities called “objects,” which he has to struggle against and control in a vain attempt to preserve his “splendid isolation.” Rather he apprehends himself as a way of being embedded in a life-world of open possibilities. In other words, the change that has come over the experiencer through this reversal of the direction that mentation ordinarily takes is a radical status transformation—the experiencer has become a person fully awake, a “buddha.” We might illustrate this reversal by referring to the change from caterpillar to butterfly, in which almost everything alters and only a few significant features remain invariant.


This radical status transformation effected by the reversal of the thematizing and objectifying trend in experience (to which the term “mentation” properly belongs) is not a denotable object. Nor is it, in view of its experiential character, a subjectivistic absolutization of an ego in the manner of subjective and/or objective idealism. Rather what we are terming and describing as a transformation manifests in a gestalt or, more precisely, in a triad of gestalts, of meaning-bestowing intentionalities within Experience or experience-as-such. Here a word of caution may not be out of place. In speaking of Experience (with a capital letter) or experience-as-such, I try to emphasize the dynamic character of what in the Tibetan texts is termed sems-nyid and clearly differentiated from sems, “mind/mentation.” The Sanskrit language uses citta for both mind/mentation and experience-as-such, and this has led to endless confusions.


Objectivists, like other reductionists, are unable to understand the dynamic image of the living individual as it is presented by the Yogacara thinkers through the notion of yoga, indicating the process of a person's tuning into the dynamics of life. For the objectivist, nouns, whether they refer to mentation or to a gestalt, as in the example here, stand for things that are supposed to have properties in and of themselves and stand in relationship to one another independently of any individual's understanding them. However, it is not only the Western interpreters of Buddhist thought who started from the objectivist's fallacious premise. Many Buddhists also subscribed to it, as may be inferred from the Sanskrit names applied to the rigidification of what was basically a process, such as vijnanavada, cittamatra, and vijnaptimatra. With their insistence on a “nothing but” (matra), they played into the hands of those who were held captive by their structure-oriented, objectifying thinking, and thus were largely responsible for the fact that Buddhist thought stagnated and eventually disappeared from the Indian scene. There was little left to distinguish it from the static, structure-oriented Brahmanical systems.


It was the creative approach initiated by the Yogacara thinkers that had the greatest impact on those who came into contact with it. They were not so concerned with the building blocks to which a dynamic system such as mind/mentation might be reduced, although they (or at least some of them) could not resist the temptation to add a few building blocks to the existing number. They were mainly concerned with the question of how one could understand oneself in one's psychospiritual development, how one could understand the spiritual way as a process rather than an inert link between two static states. Thus this innovative and creative approach is reflected in the presentation of the texts that go by the name of “tantra.” In its technical application, this term sums up all that goes into the “weaving of life's tapestry.” As the designation for a holistic process, it takes into account man's multifaceted nature and deals with him as a concrete reality rather than as a mere abstraction that screens off all other possible perspectives. Since the concrete individual, the embodied experiencer, is always sexually differentiated, his or her comprehension of the “world” involves a sexual awareness that expresses itself—as does every form of awareness—in images that cut across the physical and the psychic. These images are both “felt” images and “imaged” feelings; they do not reduce man to the merely sensual, as is claimed by the cultists of the “nothing-but.” By such a preposterous claim, these reductionists merely display their distrust of, if not implacable hostility toward, imagination, which alone can open up new visions of reality and stir up resonances in people.


On the other hand, the Yogacara thinkers' process-oriented view, which emphasizes the human system's process of unfolding, fitted well into the rDzogs-chen view, which emphasizes the system's self-renewal and freedom and expresses a fundamental complementarity in the system's overall dynamics. This truly holistic view, which has found its most profound presentation in the writings of Klong-chen rab-'byams-pa (1308–1363/64) does not derive from any Indian prototype, but must be considered as a distinctly Tibetan contribution, which revitalized Buddhist thinking and redeemed it from the rigidity to which a multiplicity of “schools” of thought had reduced it. There is no Tibetan author who can compare with Klong-chen rab-'byams-pa for depth of insight and vastness of vision.


Nonetheless, there have been attempts by the rDzogs-chen interpreters themselves, and by other lesser spirits, to reduce its scope and fit it into the narrowly circumscribed limits of their particular understanding. Rather than being a specific teaching, rDzogs-chen thought touches in its dynamics upon what in modern terms we would call the “principle of evolution,” “seeing” to it that the structures that evolve do so in the manner of a free play that determines its own rules as the play goes on. The play itself may be likened to a giant fluctuation preparing the meaning, a process of tuning in to the dynamics of the whole, to its movement toward its next structure. What in a static world view is the end, in a dynamic, evolutionary world view is always a new beginning.


The presentation of these and other related points, which are the subject matter of the chapters that follow, is based on the original texts, Pali, Sanskrit, or Tibetan, which I have allowed to speak for themselves through ample quotations. In constantly referring back to the original source material I have heeded Husserl's call, Wir wollen auf die 'Sache selbst' zurückgehen (“we will go, from our habitual empty talk about things, back to the things themselves”). We have also heeded Heidegger's admonition that in dealing with the thought of thinkers of the past we have to adopt a dual attitude: to examine their thoughts critically and to make them into one's own. This is done by first listening and attending not so much to “what is expressed in explicit formulations, but what is laid before our eyes as still unsaid through the formulations that are used” (Heidegger 1962, p. 182.). The implication is that one has to gain an original understanding that in itself already contains the possibility of explicating and communicating what is meant. This varies from context to context reflecting back on the situation in which man finds himself. Buddhism with its abiding concern for the human individual has always adopted a phenomenological approach rather than the abstract-theoretical one that has been favored in the Western world until recent times and has inevitably led to the dehumanization of everything human. It is a philosophy without gnosis (knowledge), a psychology without psyche (mind), and a universe without man and life. This extreme reductionism is now being more and more discredited by modern science. Modern science, unlike the humanities, which still pursue their course of dehumanization, has been forced by its own relentless probing of reality, not only to reinstate man as a participant in it and an integral aspect of its unfolding, but also to recognize that the universe is pervasively intelligent, not in the sense that it has a mind (or Mind), but that it is meaning, superthought (a neologism meaning a concept still in the making). Through the ideas of modern science runs an element of paradox that connects them, though not mechanistically, with Eastern (Buddhist, Hinduist, and Taoist) thinking, and the number of scientists who acknowledge their indebtedness to, or affinity with, Eastern thought is growing. Similarly, Buddhist thought, from its side, because of its preeminently nonreductionistic stance, is closer to the ideas of modern science than to the outdated notions of a past age through which Buddhism was originally interpreted in the West. This interpretation was based on Newtonian mechanics applied to language (as if words had an independent existence) and on a sentimental escape into wishful thinking (dubbed rational philosophy). Such ideas were simply forced upon the Buddhist texts without the slightest attempt being made to understand what the texts themselves might have to say.


My use of modern scientific terms in the chapters that follow is not an attempt on my part to show that Buddhism is somehow another form of science, but is meant as a tool to bring to light that which has remained unsaid in what has been said and thereby to show that Buddhism still has “something to say,” and that this something is significant. If such scientific concepts as “dissipative structure” (developed by Ilya Prigogine in the context of nonequilibrium systems characterized by a high degree of energy exchange with the environment), “symmetry,” “symmetry transformations,” “symmetry break” (once restricted to geometry, but now expanded into the idea of cosmic evolution), “homology” (applicable both in biology and mathematics), and many others, have already shown their usefulness in unraveling problems in other areas than in the ones in which they originated, there is no a priori reason why they should not be able to do so also in the field of Buddhism with its, in the broadest sense of the word, evolutionary leanings.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Edward,

You wrote:  While Guenther points out reductionism in 3rd person science he fails to point out 1st person reductionism in his Buddhist phenomenology. It goes both ways. Just because we have an “experience” doesn't mean the meaning we attach to it should be off limits. Even Wilber's AQAL IMP it an “outside” map. And according to Wilber 1st person interior experiences, of themselves, have no access to the levels of structuralism and hence often fall prey to the myth of the given due to this lack of reference. Guenther is guilty of another form of reductionism, despite his rhetoric to the contrary, that of dividing the subject/object, interior/exterior into unreconcilable methodologies. Whereas an IMP sees not only that each methodology has its own enative paradigm but how they relate, and it is in this relation that we can indeed come up with better interpretations for the “experience.” And also, that the interpretation itself will affect the very nature of said experience.

Can you point specifically to the aspects of his argument that lead you to think he is engaged in phenomenological reductionism?  I think he makes it clear in his opening essay that he thinks that reductionism and creativity are complementary movements, and that some degree of reductionism is present in all philosophical approaches, including Buddhism.  In my understanding of Guenther's perspective (in the book from which this essay was taken as well as in his other works), he regards science, hermeneutics, and other methodologies as valuable.  I don't think he's trying to oppose the Dzogchen approach to other paradigms, but to outline and give new language to what he sees as a dynamic, process-oriented approach which cultivates and encourages an active, creative intelligence.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Edward is experiencing problems with Gaia (*&^%$#@! “improvements” to Gaia!), so I'm posting the following for him:

It seems to me that Guenther defines reductionism as a function of systematizing or modeling experience. Hence the reduction comes in the former, while the latter is “open.” Hence he sets up a reductionistic duality between the two as kela has repeatedly pointed out in the talking school versus the practicing school, between hermeneutics versus meditation.

 
The discussion of mentation as process versus structure is an example. The former is what we experience directly while the later is what happens when we try to fix our evil “ideas” upon the experience. The experience is open, creative process and the model is constructed, solid, fixed. And of course it's language's fault “with its linear arrangement.” If we could but focus on the phenomenological experience we'd transcend and be free of the static dualities inherent in thought models; we'd experience the nondual and “become a person fully awake, a ‘buddha.'” We come to “Experience as such” (capital letter emphasized in the original).

 
Guenther tells us that “objectivists, like other reductionists,” just don't get this, being that they are only looking from the outside. But it's not their fault; they cannot help themselves because it's the very nature of language/thought to make such dichotomies and thus reduce experience to their categories. But not those Yogacara, tantrist pioneers, that went right to the heart of reality with their “psychospiritual development,” which is dynamic, holistic process and not static, atomistic fixity. Man is now a “concrete reality” rather than a “mere abstraction.” “Buddhist thought…because of its nonreductionistic stance,” i.e., it's direct, non-dual, phenomenological experience, is the solution to the “extreme reductionism…[of] modern science.”

 
Now I do like the following paragraph from Guenther:

 
“Rather than being a specific teaching, rDzogs-chen thought touches in its dynamics upon what in modern terms we would call the “principle of evolution,” “seeing” to it that the structures that evolve do so in the manner of a free play that determines its own rules as the play goes on. The play itself may be likened to a giant fluctuation preparing the meaning, a process of tuning in to the dynamics of the whole, to its movement toward its next structure. What in a static world view is the end, in a dynamic, evolutionary world view is always a new beginning.”

 
That is, structure and meaning are evolving and open to change. But so is the experience! The latter is not some fixed, given reality in itself either. And it is in relationship with the structure that will determine the experiential change as well. It's not like we contact a given experience that remains the same despite the model's conceptualizations a la Wilber's timeless causal. That would obviously be the myth of the given, no? And it seems it's this implicit, given, phenomenological experience-even if we label it an open, dynamic process-that is a form of  reductionism.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

I see the contrast between “reductionism” and “creativity” as indicating another set of distinctions, vz., that between “deconstructive” and “constructive” approaches. Or, to use Rorty's reversed polemical formulation: “edifying” vs. “systematic.” 

If, as you say, Balder, Guenther is trying to say that one is “talking school” and the other is “practising” school,” then I think that he is coming at these questions from an apologetic/polemical approach, or what Jim bemoans as the “persuasive” style. I have no problem with that as long as we can untangle the rhetorical elements involved. If we look at the first sentence — “The history of Buddhist thought is a unique example of the interplay between creativity and reductionism, between novelty and confirmation…” — we can see that he has already “loaded” his terminology. The terms “novelty” and “confirmation” do indeed seem to invoke the distinction between “first hand” and “second hand.”

As a counter ploy, one could adopt Rorty's contrary formulation of the distinction, and argue in favor of the Madhyamika approach over against the Yogachara approach, viz, that it is the Yogachara that is “systematizing” and becoming over-involved in conceptual construction, reification, etc.

In any case, whenever Guenther's commentary is involved, things get complex… and interesting.  He's not simply arguing for a particular scholarly description; he's arguing, in a normative manner, for the superiority of a certain way of viewing the world, for a specific philosophy, viz, that of Yogachara/Vajrayana/Dzogchen as seen through the lense of Heidegger's phenomenology. 

I think he's a nutter. And I like nuts. They make life more interesting. :-)

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

In other writings, Guenther talks about the distinction between Sutrayana and Vajrayana as involving a distinction between the “pundit” and the “siddha.” At least in this case he is invoking a real historical distinction, though it is clearly a distinction used polemically by the Vajrayana against the Sutrayana. Of course, it is not purely polemical: as the Vajrayana apologist will add, “but there is a place for the sutrayana in the grand Vajrayana scheme of things…”  That kind of paternal move is an inclusivist move, and the relationship implied by is not truly complementary (or complimentary :-), as one modality is clearly subordinated to the other. As Guenther interprets the two, the “siddha” is involved with the first hand “experience” of what the sutrayana pundit only deals with in a second-hand textual, reflective (“merely translative”) manner. Apparently, he sees the Yogachara adepts as “forerunners” to the Vajrayana siddhas. In any case, Balder, your interpretation of Guenther appears to be bore out by comments found elsewhere in his works.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Hey Kela,

I think I bemoan the same general kind of thing you bemoan when you talk in the “privileged access” threads about members of “in groups” who label you a “pundit” because you use language in a certain way.

There's a certain use of labels - “flatland,” “mere pundit,” characterizing analytic philosophy as the “anemic revival of logical positivism,” “first-tier,” “green,” “scientific materialist,” “reductionist,” “commie,” “fascist,” etc. - that stops discussion before it has a chance to begin. It seems to violate what T. Edward Damer calls the principles of fallibility and charity.

If someone wants to be part of an in-group that is a closed communication system in that it shuts out critical feedback, that's their choice. But that's got nothing to do with being “integral” or “philosophical,” does it?

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Hi Jim,

I think that there is a rhetorical dimension to discourse that we as a culture have largely been ignoring since the time of Descartes. In Antiquity and the Renaissance it had a much more prominent position as a subject. Logic and Grammar were studied alongside things like Rhetoric and Eloqution. From a “logical” point of view, the informal fallacies are fallacies. From a rhetorical point of view, they are techniques of persuasion. I'm not arguing in favor of them, only that the study of rhetoric helps us to understand them better. This is perhaps one of the positive effects that the recent upsurge of interest in literature, as over against philosophy.

Philosophy has a kind of double nature. On the one hand, it aspires to a kind of neutral discourse, to pure description, for the adequacy of a particular view, like the scholarly and scientific disciplines. And yet, on the other hand, it has a dominant normative side, like theology, in which arguments of a certain nature are given for “the truth” or for a particular “philosophy of life” or ethic.

Interestingly, nowhere is this ambivalence more apparent than in Wilber's work. He comes from the discipline of transpersonal psychology, which is puportedly a social science. And he calls himself a “pundit,” which means a scholar of tradition; but it is quite clear, as you insightfully pointed out to me once, that by “pundit” he means not only a scholar of tradition, but an apologist for tradition. In other words, he sees himself as a kind of “guardian” of tradition over against trends within modernity that he sees as insidious — the “reductive materialism” of Marx, Darwin, and Freud and “scientism” to begin with, but later, the “relativist” and purely deconstructive trends of post-modernism.

The issue is further complicated by the introduction of “integral spirituality.” What is this duck-billed platypus anyway? The noun here is “spirituality.” Does that mean it is a form of spirituality? Wilber has said many times, map is not territory, don't confuse the finger for the moon, and yet now, apparently, “integral spirituality” has become a “way of life,” a path.

One concern of mine is when normative discourse masquerades as descriptive discourse, as if there is semblance that some kind of neutral discourse is being attempted at. Sometimes I get the sense that certain transpersonalists, perennialists and integralites want to hind behind the mask of a scholarly presentation, and yet take pot shots at their various pet peeves, the flatland fuckhead, e.g.

As I note with Guenther, it's been clear for some time to us in “the field” that he has an axe to grind, and that's fine. Many scholars feel that a purely descriptive discourse is boring or not meaningful to them, so they go on a “mission.” In Relgious Studies, we referred to this crew as the “mission from God” crew. I was an apologist, until the completion of my Masters, from which point I was told to grow up and get over my “youthful enthusiasm” for my subject. (The other issue at work here is that as an academic discipline, Religious Studies needs to distinguish itself from Theology, from the seminary. The Academy as a public institution fought long and hard to distinguish itself from the influence of the Church, and they view the discipline of Religious Studies with a bit of suspicion.)

The discipline of philosophy is different. There, intellectual history and commentary are looked down upon and discouraged, and you are encourage to present and defend “your own philosophical view” on what you think “the truth” is.

…just some ramblings of an incoherent mind. :-) lol

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Hi Kela,

Thanks for the informative post; pretty coherent ramblings from an incoherent mind. ;-)

I've been wanting to start a thread on “integral” dialogue and maybe I'll do that this week.

You may be familiar with Canadian scholar Douglas Walton, known for his research on fallacies and argumentation. He goes beyond Damer and others who take the kind of approach Damer takes toward fallacies in that Walton recognizes that fallacies are context-dependent.

What I have in mind when I talk about persuasion is not what Walton calls persuasion dialogue or critical discussion I have no problem with that. What I have in mind is persuasion as in the psychology of persusion. I'll address this in another thread. There's nothing wrong with wanting and trying to influence others. But some persuasive techniques or “weapons of influence” as Robert Cialdini refers to them, are problematic, IMO. They are especially problematic when used by someone who ostensibly wants to help people develop and “awaken,” and this is because certain persuasive techniques are effective only to the degree that those they are used to influence are credulous and asleep. (I realize that someone might argue that the use of weapons of influence is “skillful means.” I'll address that when I start a thread on this topic.)

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Weapons of mass deconstruction? A man after my own arsenal…

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Jim, I'd like it if you started a thread on “integral” dialogue.  I started a thread or two on a related subject awhile back, but it still seems like a timely and important issue for me, and I'd appreciate an opportunity to take the discussion further.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Hi Jim,
That's fascinating stuff.  As you can tell from the blogpsot site, I've become interested in rhetoric in argumentative discourse. I'm presently teaching workshops on argumentative essay writing and critical thinking, mostly to kids from well to do families who want to get into elite American universities, and now my business partner is pushing me in the direction of teaching debate. (I've become Plato's “sophist” — whoring out my knowledge and expertise. :-) So, this is all very interesting to me, and I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

By the way, that's a great point that Metzinger brings up, re: that what is at stake are competing theories.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Jim et al. You might also want to check out this recent Wilber interview in Ode Magazine on cross-cultural communication for the new thread.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Thanks for the link!

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

From Indian Philosophy by Richard King (Edinburgh UP, 1999): 

“For the Yogacara, then, one should attempt to pacify the constructivist tendencies of the mind through the practice of yoga until one is able to see what is really presented to consciousness once one takes away one’s predetermined beliefs about the nature of reality. The Yogacara path is in this sense an exercise in phenomenological reductionism within a context of Buddhist meditative praxis. By relinquishing the language of subject and object one apprehends the bare awareness itself, devoid of the baggage of conceptual thought (prapanca)…. For the Yogacara school the doctrine of emptiness (sunyata) is 'relocated' into a phenomenological and meditative context” (98-9). 

We return time and again to the two truths debate between Gorampa and Tsongkhapa, between Yogacara-influenced Madhyamaka (Guenther) and that without such influence. Recall the debate about  prapanca between them? It seems we are never going to agree on this. Not surprisingly, as we are but bit players in this debate that has been going on for a long, long time with the real heavy hitters. This for example from the original “Status of States” thread: 

Note above how Garfield sees “verbal designations” as inherent and mutually determinative in the two truths, not some linguistic contamination that must be eliminated to experience pure emptiness. We see this reflected in the two truths debate as the proper role for “conceptual elaboration” (in the “letting daylight” thread) From Thakchoe:  

A key issue here is whether the transcendence of conceptual elaboration (prapanca) calls for a total obliteration of conceptual categories (107).  

Although it is not entirely without ontological implications, Tsongkhapa does not view the transcendence of the categories of prapanca as a metaphysical transcendence. What is transcended is the conventional understanding associated with the dualistic understanding of things—but without entailing the nonexistence of those things. This follows from his prior commitment to a transcendent epistemological perspective as the basis on which the essenceless, relational and contingent nature of phenomena is established. So while the cognitive agent experiences a total transcendence of the categories of prapanca in the realization of ultimate truth during meditative equipoise, T takes this experience of transcendence to operate strictly within the epistemic domain—within the psychophysical aggregates, which are not themselves transcended or dissolved. Transcending the categories of prapanca is not metaphysical transcendence (110-11). 

As espoused by T, ultimate valid cognition is transcendent wisdom in the sense that it is directed to the transcendent sphere—toward ultimate truth, supramundane or unconditioned nirvana—but it is nevertheless mundane in terms of its scope and meaning. Transcendent wisdom still operates entirely within the range of the conditioned world—it is itself dependently arisen and does not imply a shift to a metaphysically unconditioned sphere…. The true and essential characteristic of transcendent knowledge thus consists in a precise understanding of the conditioned world itself… Once transcendent knowledge is achieved, the meditator still makes use of dualities in practical contexts…and yet the habitual tendency toward prapanca ceases, for the meditator now sees such dualities as part of an ongoing process rather than as inherently persisting discrete entities (112-14). 
T regards nondual realization of ultimate truth as an epistemic event. In his understanding nondual realization is possible, yet the apprehending consciousness—transcendent wisdom—retains its ontological distinctness as subject, and the cognitive sphere—ultimate reality—likewise retains its ontological distinctness as object (115).  
To see ultimate truth nondually is, in his [T’s] view, to see phenomena as empty, and given the conceptual unity between emptiness and dependent arising, so, in experiential terms, to see phenomena as empty is also to see phenomena as dependently arisen. It is critical therefore to understand the nature of the conceptual unity between emptiness and dependent arising, for the same principle of conceptual unity must be applied on the experiential level to resolve the tension between knowing phenomena as empty, therefore nondually, and knowing them as dependently arisen, therefore dually. Here the issue of the unity of the two truths becomes central (124). 
Thus, although nondual transcendent wisdom gives access to ultimate truth, T argues that this wisdom does not do so in isolation from dual empirical wisdom. Nondual transcendent wisdom is itself an empirical phenomenon, and it is not therefore an empirically transcendent truth, as Gorampa would have it (126).  
T’s main purpose is attaining nondual knowledge is not to eschew the subject-object dichotomy. The purpose, as he sees it, is rather to purify deluded cognitive states and destroy ego-tainted emotions in the service of bodhicitta…. Both the dual and nondual perspectives are required for success on the path, and that is why T creates no hierarchy between them (128). 

The characterization of prapanca offered by Gorampa, however, has strong metaphysical implications…. G makes it very clear that just as he does not regard prapanca as a merely cognitive process, neither is the transcendence of prapanca merely epistemic—it is not simply a change in one’s perspective. Prapanca is constitutive of all causally effective phenomena, and so the transcendence of the categories of prapanca means the transcendence of all empirical phenomena, including empirical consciousness—as they are all causally effective. Thus the transcendence of prapanca is a transcendence of the very structures that constitute cognition, and so, one might say, even of cognition itself (or at least as it is part of the system of conventional appearances). 

Like G, many of his traditional allies—Rendawa, Rongton Skakya Gyaltsen, Skakya Chogden, Karmapa Mikyo Dorje, Mipham Rinpoche, and Gendun Chopel—also treat prapanca as simply synonymous with the system of conventional truth. This camp equates prapancas with the entire system of conventionalities and the latter with ignorance and the effects of ignorance. Thus they all maintain, like G, that prapancas…appear as long as metaphysical transcendence is not achieved. 

For G it is contradictory to hold that one can retain any connections with the conventional world while transcending the categories of prapanca—any relation with the conventional world is seen as detrimental to the pursuit of liberation. The transcendence of the categories of prapanca means, therefore, the total ontological and epistemological separation from the conventional world (111). 

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Even though Wilber is sometimes guilty of contradicting his own theory, I agree with him when he says the following, relevant to Guenther above. From Integral Spirituality, Chapter 8, MONOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM AND THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN:

This is essentially the belief that the reflection paradigm, or monological empiricism and monological phenomenology [aka phenemenological reductionism], will cover transpersonal and spiritual realities. But the subject does not reflect reality, it co-creates it.

All of those, the postmodernists agree, are shot through with the myth of the given. In other words, many approaches, wishing to get spiritual realities acknowledged by the modern world, simply take empirical methodology and try to extend it, make it bigger, push it into areas such as meditation, Gaia, transpersonal consciousness, brain scans with meditation, empirical tests of cognitive capacity with contemplation, chaos and complexity science, holograms and holographic information, the Akashic field, and so on. Although they might overcome one problem—such as Newtonian-Cartesian mechanism, for example—by introducing something like “mutually interdependent networks of dynamically related processes”—not a single one of those approaches addresses the more fundamental problem that the postmodernists are criticizing, namely, that all of those approaches are still caught in the myth of the given and the ignoring of intersubjectivity. Indeed, those approaches give no indication that they even know what it means.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Has anyone here read The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation?  It's one I've browsed online, but I haven't picked it up yet.  But it looks like it might be a relevant one, given some of our regular points of contention.  Levin treats multiple perspectives sympathetically in this book – Heidegger, Guenther, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida.  His discussion of the metaphysics of presence in relation to Gelassenheit (which Guenther translates as 'superthought' and relates to a Nyingma Dzogchen notion of presence) is worth reading.  (Starting on page 241, if the link doesn't take you to the right place.)

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

I like the connection Levin makes between vision and Gelassenheit, i.e., an open gaze that takes in the entire scene without focusing on any particular thing. A gaze which, incidentally, is the recommended way of seeing in meditative technique. He argues that in so doing we alleviate the metaphysics of presence in that we no longer ascribe constancy, fixity or permanence to either the objects or subject of the gaze, as all is diffused into the “field.” He further argues that this vision is not a “pure immediacy in the sense of fusion or coincidence” but rather “circumspective: it is situated in a field of practical relations, in a world; and it is inseparable from its circumstances” (243).  

If this is what Guenther, and by extension Dzogchen, means by “presence” then I can agree with it. A couple of brief points though. Even within this field-gaze we do not take in the totality of what is there; our awareness (even pre-reflective) is extremely limited given the cognitive unconscious. And I get the sense that Guenther’s “presence” assumes exactly the kind of metaphysics of presence that Levin says Heidegger does not. For example, Guenther: “I have heeded Husserl’s call: ‘we will go, from our habitual empty talk about things, back to the things themselves.’”

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

One of the clearest, simplist descriptions of Gelassenheit I have ever read can be found in Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Suzuki is able to describe in two paragraphs what Heidegger and Gadamer need several pages to accomplish. Both Suzuki and Heidegger relate it to how we relate to the “other.” Gadamer relates it to the hermeneutic method. There is a good description of Gelassenheit in Caputo's book, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought, in which he relates Heidegger's later thinking to Eckhart's thought. In the little book by Heidegger on Gelassenheit, translated as A Disourse on Thinking, Heidegger refers to his indebtedness to Eckhart. There is also a chapter in the Chuang Tzu that treats the same theme. It is also well known that later in life Heidegger had become interested in Taoism. Heidegger's definition of phenomenology: “To let that which shows itself in itself, show itself in itself, in the very way in which it shows itself in itself.”  (The German, of course, is considerably more complex. :-)

Like Suzuki, Chogyam Trungpa, in The Myth of Freedom, also relates the Mahayana practice of dhyana to “openness” and “spaciousness.” Sukuki: “The way to control your sheep or cow is to give him a large spacious meadow.”  (This is also a clever allusion, for Yogachara thought had referred to the “space” of consciousness as “citta-gochara”: literally, “the mind's cow pasture.” :-) Suzuki and Trungpa's critique of the “hinayana” practice of “mindfulness,” as “guarding” and “taking account,” parallels, in a striking manner, the later Heidgger and Gadamer's critique of the phenomenological epoche, the suspension of judgement, which characterizes Husserl's method.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Edward, I agree that Guenther, in the excerpt above, doesn't appear to be sensitive to some of the issues we've been exploring in this pod.  However, I do not think he is entirely blind to these issues either.  He is, after all, a scholar of Heidegger and other postmodernists, as well as of Buddhism; and as I recall his argument in the book from which the essay is taken, he weaves together perspectives from Gadamer, Varela, Maturana, and Lakoff, among others, in his exploration of “visionary living.”  In other words, I believe he is cognizant of intersubjectivity, the critique of metaphysics, and enactivist perspectives.  In the book, for instance, he describes the 'lifeworlds' of sentient beings in autopoeitic terms, not simply in representationist or 'purely phenomenological' terms.  But admittedly, I will need to return to the book and look it over again, with a new gaze this time, to give a fuller assessment – since I read it years ago, without much awareness of the issues we've been exploring here.

In The Opening of Vision, which seems to me to advocate an open-ended visionary approach similar to the one that Guenther explores in his work, and that is present also in TSK, Levin describes his method as phenomenological hermeneutics – a visionary wedding of both postmodern hermeneutical sensibility and phenomenological engagement with the emergent experiential field.  I appreciate this, and I've been inspired to go out and find his book to give his ideas a fuller 'test drive.'  I will copy a couple passages from the online copy of the book that I was reading this morning.

Concerning your comments about the cognitive unconscious and the limitations of our vision, Levin has some relevant comments on 'the shadow' that you might want to check out.

~*~

In the Seminar on Herakleitos, which he gave with Heidegger, Fink asserts that 'There is a constitutive distance between seeing and what is seen', and adds that this distance is 'in the unity of the overarching light that illuminates and makes visible'.  In the lighting and clearing of being, in the field of our visionary being, seer and seen are disclosed, not in any mystical union that would dissolve their individual identity, but rather in the integrity of an intertwining, deepening their original contact and expanding the existential meaning of their receiprocal presence.  This is, to be sure, a vision.  But a vision is always a task, a task of promise.

This task, as I conceive it, is, and must be, a radical one.  Now, 'radicality' is a term which, according to its etymology, designates a 'return' to the roots, the origin, the beginning.  But our method of reflection, a hermeneutical phenomology, ensures that this return will be doubly radical, because in attempting a 'return' to 'the' primordial ground, 'the' primordial unity (arche, nomos, logos) of subject and object, our thinking is radicalized even further, in that its phenomenological and hermeneutical character makes it unavoidably self-referential.  Thus, the return turns critical, deconstructive, like Foucault's archeology of knowledge and his genealogy of power: the return ends up undermining and subverting the necessity, the authority, the metaphysical legitimation of all perceptual structures – including the construct, or projection, of an absolute, and absolutely graspable, primordial unity.  The radicality of a hermeneutical return consists in the fact that the move by which we break out of the structure of subject and object situates us in the 'unity' of a field whose very nature compels us to recognize our relative positionality and acknowledge the elusiveness of any absolute unity.

The 'unity' of 'the ground' is the unity of a dynamic field of intertwining presences and absences: a field of luminous presences endlessly pointing beyond themselves into the invisible.  The 'unity' with which we are concerned, here, is only 'primordial' in a relative sense: it is a function of our present capacity to disentangle ourselves from an excessive and unnecessary identification with the prevailing construction of reality, the historical structure of ego and object.  The goal of our return is not a state of total fusion, or the attainment of the 'original' unity, in any case inconceivable, but rather our release from virtual confinement within the prevailing epistemological and ontological structures of experience: a release, by grace of the bountiful matrix of vision, the gift of the lighting, which consists in an expanded sense of visionary possibilities, and an opportunity to pursue the luminous interconnections already laid down for the rooting of perception by grace of the intertwining dimensions of the field.

~*~

Anwesenheit, the sense of 'presence' demonstrated in Gelassenheit, does not fall under the spell of the 'metaphysics of presence'.  Gelassenheit, a third mode of presence, is in fact Heidegger's answer to the history of this metaphysics.  It manifests an historically new way of being-with,a nd therefore also, a new epistemology, a new ontology.

Of decisive importance for this argument is the difference between the 'presence' involved in Gelassenheit and the 'presence' involved in Vorhandensein.  The latter is described (in our second passage from Sallis' text) as involving a 'self-contained positivity.'  Thus, when Sallis argues against the possibility of 'presence' in this sense, he observes – accurately and appropriately – that the hammer, like all other things, is 'extended beyond itself into the referential totality.'  In other words, his argument against the 'presence' of Vorhandensein is that everything we encounter belongs to a referential field: nothing exists as a 'self-contained positivity', or as an isolated substance entirely independent of its situation within the world.  But this sense of 'presence' which is manifest in the attitude of Gelassenheit is not at all a sense defined in terms of traditional substantiality and field-independence. On the contrary, Discourse on Thinking, Heidegger's work on Gelassenheit, makes it very clear, through an abundance of descriptive formulations, that the being-with of Gelassenheit constitutes a 'presence' which always takes place in – and with an awareness of – a referential field, a field or region of Being.

We may therefore conclude that the 'presence' of Gelassenheit is not called into question by the critique of the 'metaphysics of presence'.  Letting-be simply constitutes a radically different relationship with beings.  In vision, for example, letting-be is certainly not a 'simple sensory presence', a meaningless, wordless abstraction, an encounter reducible to the philosopher's sense datum. Moreover, it is neither a 'cold', theoretically disinterested staring-at, nor a looking-at totally possessed by instrumental calculations.  Letting-be is an interested looking which cares; it is a being-with which cares; it is a response-ability to the presencing of Being which lets it come forth, lets it be present, without needing to master and dominate its presence.  Letting-be is a being-with which understands the Being of the ground, and therefore cares very much for the field, the ground, of our visionary life.

Far from undermining the claim that Gelassenheit exemplifies a valuable experience with 'presence' (Anwesenheit), the post-modern critique of the metaphysics of presence first makes it possible for us to conceive a gaze belonging to a new epoch of history: a gaze whose caring is what fulfills its hermeneutic capacity, its capacity to open into unconcealment.  I agree that our historical plight is connected to the dominance of a metaphysics of presence, and that we must radically deconstruct its operations in the structuring of our visionary situations.  But, beyond this negative stage, we must attempt, more positively, to think a gaze which does not position itself into opposition to Being – and does not 'posit' Being as a constant, permanent, fixed presence, an immutable substance, or a reified totality.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

“It is neither a cold, theoretical disinterested staring-at, nor a looking-at totally possessed by instrumental calculations.” p. 244.
 
That is the tension I was referring to, some time ago, which is related to the “middle” voice of Greek, between the active and passive.

Compare now the dialectical tension referred to in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, in the chapter on “Control”, p. 31. See the bottom of paragraph 2, on page 32:

 “To ignore them is not good; that is the worst policy. The second worst is try to control them.”

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Is Gelassenheit a form of the myth of the given? the metaphysics of presence? the philosophy of consciousness, or the subject?
Hmmm.

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

Levin above, in the excerpt I typed up, is arguing that it is not.  What do you think?

Re: From Reductionism to Creativity

I went to the university library yesterday to look for Guether's book, and Levin's.  We had the latter, but not the former.  Levin's book looks interesting – more relevant to this group than Guenther's – so I may start a new thread on it, once I've gone through it a bit more.